International Law and Friendship

Trump quote on Kim Jong Un

'He wrote me beautiful letters and we fell in love'

Charles De Gaulle on whether France has friends

France doesn't have friends, it has interests

Dworkin on friendship

Equality and respect

Types of friendship

Avoiding war

Utility/contractual

Aspirational, diplomatic friendship

Aspirational friendship

Aristotle: shared values, mutual respect, good intentions for one another

3 types of thick friendship (Simpson)

1. Duellists

2. Merchants

3. Summiteers

Duellists (Simpson)

Schmitt: warfare, mutually respected sovereign equals

Duelling regulated through formal and informal rules

Policing kills duels

Merchants (Simpson)

1913, Norman Angell: states becoming so entwined in economic and trade relations that war almost impossible

Summiteers (Simpson)

Friendship and trust develops in interpersonal relations along diplomacy and law e.g., Reagan and Gorbachev

Enmity (Schmitt)

War as relation between states

Absolute enmity as moralising the enemy and turning 'it' into a criminal or monster, aim no longer peace treaties but annihilation

Simpson's 5 characters

1. Sovereign

2. Enemy

3. Criminal

4. Pirate

5. Neutrals

What has each of Simpson's 5 characters done?

Characters are both constitutive and disruptive, each has activated or provoked, or been brought to life by a legal infrastructure, a 'law of...', each undercuts or threatens the existence of the sovereign without qualities

Sovereign (Simpson)

IL thinking of itself as a study of sovereigns in the abstract, 'opaque, featureless, equals' - every state a 'most-favoured nation', field of 'sovereigns qua sovereign'

Schmitt on sovereigns

War as a relation among equally sovereign persons

1648 Peace of Westphalia

Concrete reality of sovereign territorial orders existing side by side in a particular space at a particular time, as a consequence of personalisation

UN Charter Articles 53 and 107

Enemy state = enemy of any signatory of Charter during WWII (Germany and Japan), still not removed

Enemy (Simpson)

Designated under jus ad bellum

Jus in bello organising relations among enemies when in conflict

Idea of a limited war

Shift to thinking of them as criminals

UN and enemies (Simpson)

UN as a coalition of friends at its origins with a smattering of official enemies (Germany and Japan) who have now become close friends of UN (disproportionate funding support)

Schmitt on IL and war

IL has followed politics has followed technology

IL permits only just was

No longer based on theological, moral or juridical norms but institutional and structural quality of political forms

Criminals (Simpson)

Those who failed to become friends, or were deprived of proto-friendship, were converted into criminals - lawful adversaries became prosecutors and judges - later 'the international community'

Pirate (Simpson)

Outside the law, enemy of humanity - will be treated neither as an enemy under the laws of war or as a criminal to be prosecuted in court

Lawless space e.g., GTMO

Schmitt on the pirate

Means not just the individual but its ship and the entire crew, everyone will be hanged and captured together, no pardon

Neutrals (character, Simpson)

Poised between friendship and enmity

More prevalent in the 18th century

Lorimer: 'an abnormal relation' - 'aberration' from normal relations of 'peace and amity' with occasional squabbles

Wight's 3 Rs

Realism

Rationalism

Revolutionism

Realism (Wight)

States as self interested, state-based, dominant position = anarchy, state of nature

Solution = give up sovereignty (Leviathan), utopian project in IL

Hobbes, Machiavelli

Rationalism (Wight)

Thin cooperation, thin friendship, contractual/transactional, thin laws

Legalism

Grotius

Revolutionism (Wight)

Currently system radically imperfect and unjust, either must change or it will change

Evolutionary revolutionists (Wight)

Moving towards historical conclusion, always a dialectical struggle followed by revolution, historicist reading, one reading of Marx - nothing we can do

1990s liberal idea of the end of history

Francis Fukuyuma

Everyone so integrated into liberal democratic post-industrial late-capitalist highly marketised globalised war -> war pointless -> friendly, liberal democracies

Kant on securing perpetual peace

Perpetual peace would be secured by a combination of trade and democracy + republicanism

Solve the Hobbesian dilemma through actual friendship between trading liberal democracies, not through war, Leviathan or legalised forms of friendship

Hégel end of history

A particular political, economic or social system may develop that would constitute the end-point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and final form of human government

Dialectical

Acting through opposing forces

Catastrophic revolutionists (Wight)

There will be a change, has to happen now, will be violent/revolutionary because the world is in such a terrible state

Lenin, Mao

Law of enmity (Simpson)

Pessimism that grounds IL in a law of enmity, at the heart of what IL thinks of itself as being about - organising relations among enemies and would-be enemies

Self-narrated success stories - enemies encouraged to become friends or neutrals

Simpson on collective security and law of enmity

Jus ad bellum - right to use force, attack by enemy state, when another state may befriend victim state (collective self-defence)

Collective security of UN Charter: existence of threat to peace, circumstances of unfriendliness

Schmitt on law of enmity

European 'war in form' as the 'strongest possible rationalisation and humanisation of war' -> belligerents had the same political character and same rights, both recognised each other as states

Enemy ceased to be someone 'who must be annihiliated' - peace treaty possible

Language of friendliness in IR

Alliances - friends and special relationships e.g., US and UK - not legal but think along these lines

Unfriendly or coldly associated persons need law to co-exist

Angela Merkel discovered CIA was bugging her phone, called it unfriendly -> useful interim position between friendliness and illegality

Declaration on Friendly Relations UNGA Resolution on use of force

'States shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations'

Settling disputes by peaceful means

Declaration on Friendly Relations UNGA Resolution on intervention

Duty not to intervene in matters within domestic jurisdiction

Declaration on Friendly Relations UNGA Resolution on equality

Equal rights and self-determination

Sovereign equality of states, equal rights and duties and equal members of the intl community

Pahuja on Declaration on Friendly Relations

Pahuja: not just calling for neutrality but issuing a wider challenge to IL as a whole

Western capitals saying states refusing to join IL

Treaties of amity

Treaties of friendship, often used to get enemies into court

Nicaragua, US and Iran

Decline of neutrality

Declines as a consequence of rise of ICL, LoN and UN Charter - collective security/policing model

War in Ukraine - exodus, Sweden and Finland have renounced neutrality

Jefferson on neutrality

Jefferson, 1801: US as a friendly neutral seeking 'peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none'

Grotius' requirements for neutrality

Impartiality, free passage, furnishing supplies to both sides

Only in 'doubtful cases' (unclear which side is just protagonist)

Where one side 'wicked', friendship due to the just warrior

Collective security regime

Charter, collective action

George W Bush, 2001 'every nation in the world now has a decision to make, either you are with us or you are with the terrorists'

Bandung Conference year

1955

Bandung participants

Asian and African states, most of whom newly independent

Bandung contribution

Move towards eventual creation of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) - 120 countries not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc, advance interests of developing nations in Cold War context

Bandung on colonialism and cultural cooperation

Took note of existence of colonialism and this prevents cultural cooperation and suppresses national cultures of the people

Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, basic right of the people to study their own language and culture has been suppressed

Condemned racialism as means of cultural suppression

Bandung on ending colonialism

'Colonialism in all its manifestations is an evil which should speedily be brought to an end'

Bandung on disarmament

Disarmament to save mankind and civilisation from fear and prospect of wholesale destruction

Bandung on Palestine

Support for Palestine and achievement of peaceful settlement of the Palestine question

Pahuja's description of Bandung

Bringing its own legal traditions, an 'encounter'

A 'juridical-political imaginary of a certain moment, which the reader may juxtapose with what is imagined to be possible now for international law for, in, and of the Global South'

Nehru's international as distinct from.. (Pahuja)

i) International-ism of European imperialism and its postwar continuation as imperial-internationalisation

ii) universal internationalisms

Nehru's internationalism (Pahuja)

Role imagined for international law is not to effect the transformation of others, but to allow different peoples and nations, with different laws, to meet with dignity - law of encounter not of inclusion

Universal internationalisms (Pahuja)

Putatively universal

Nehru and those at Bandung did not see European IL as the only law relating to conduct between nations, or that it would be the future, nor did they experience it as such

Renarrating history to articulate the context between their experience of a multiplicity of laws in the world

Cold War as experienced by Third World (Pahuja)

Cold War from perspective of American policy came to be experienced by the Third World as a new phase of imperialism

Pahuja on the disagreement of Cold War

European project of civilisation reshaped by 'an internecine [destructive to both sides] disagreement between warring siblings, nominally capitalist and communist, each set on a different version of (European) modernisation.'

Pahuja on the idea of newness of African and Asian states

Bandung refuted

Idea of newness relies on conflation of the juridical form of European nation-statehood with the existence of organised community and between European-style sovereignty with political and legal authority

Pahuja on why African and Asian states were viewed as 'new'

'Unless there were forms recognisable in a European idiom, there was either nothing, or at best, things that were pre-something.' - terra nullius

Tabula rasa (Pahuja

Countries turned into blank slate for enlightenment

Paradoxically coupling attempt to recognise East and accord dignity with US superiority manifest in the developmentalism of its foreign policy

Bandung on 'newness'

Imperialism as an "interruption" to both ongoing civilisations and inter-civilisational encounters. 'Asia and Africa cradle of great religions and civilisations'

Nandy quote about what the Third World was searching for (quoted by Pahuja)

'The search for dignity and stature in the world community'

West's view of Bandung (Pahuja)

IL shifting from being the law of the 'small family of nations' into claiming allegiance of nations that had no part in building it up, nations that were understood as either never to have known, or no longer to accept, the fundamental beliefs and sentiments on which it was originally founded

Nehru on West's view of Bandung

Nehru speech - seen as children meeting away from their teacher

Pahuja on whether we can refute IL as being European

Even if possible to repudiate IL as European, need not be wholly refusal, many of the conditions for entry were drawn from practices of jurisdiction particular to European public law

Eurocentrism (Pahuja)

European IL had to actively claim for itself the proper name of law during 19th century

Recent idea that European IL has no rivals

Bandung and Nehru on contemporaneous existence of multiple laws (Pahuja)

Contemporaneous existence of multiple laws was deeply understood, struggle was to work out a way to allow for the ongoing existence of that multiplicity without the laws of most people in the world being relegated to a nonlegal domain